In the silence that prolongs the span <br />Rawly of music when the record ends, <br />The red-haired boy who drove a van <br />In weekday overalls but, like his friends, <br /> <br />Wore cycle boots and jacket here <br />To suit the Sunday hangout he was in, <br />Heard, as he stretched back from his beer, <br />Leather creak softly round his neck and chin. <br /> <br />Before him, on a coal-black sleeve <br />Remote exertion had lined, scratched, and burned <br />Insignia that could not revive <br />The heroic fall or climb where they were earned. <br /> <br />On the other drinkers bent together, <br />Concocting selves for their impervious kit, <br />He saw it as no more than leather <br />Which, taught across the shoulders grown to it, <br /> <br />Sent through the dimness of a bar <br />As sudden and anonymous hints of light <br />As those that shipping give, that are <br />Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in sight. <br /> <br />He stretched out like a cat, and rolled <br />The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue, <br />And listened to a joke being told: <br />The present was the things he stayed among. <br /> <br />If it was only loss he wore, <br />He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion, <br />Complicity and nothing more. <br />He recollected his initiation, <br /> <br />And one especially of the rites. <br />For on his shoulders they had put tattoos: <br />The group's name on the left, The Knights, <br />And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.<br /><br />Thom Gunn<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/black-jackets/
